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Einstein's thought experiments. A hallmark of Albert Einstein 's career was his use of visualized thought experiments (German: Gedankenexperiment[1]) as a fundamental tool for understanding physical issues and for elucidating his concepts to others. Einstein's thought experiments took diverse forms. In his youth, he mentally chased beams of light.
Thought experiments have been used in philosophy (especially ethics), physics, and other fields (such as cognitive psychology, history, political science, economics, social psychology, law, organizational studies, marketing, and epidemiology). In law, the synonym "hypothetical" is frequently used for such experiments.
The original position (OP), often referred to as the veil of ignorance, is a thought experiment used for reasoning about the principles that should structure a society based on mutual dependence. The phrases original position and veil of ignorance were coined by the American philosopher John Rawls, [1] but the thought experiment itself was ...
Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment that appears to disprove the second law of thermodynamics. It was proposed by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. [1] In his first letter, Maxwell referred to the entity as a "finite being" or a "being who can play a game of skill with the molecules". Lord Kelvin would later call it a "demon". [2]
Galileo's ship refers to two physics experiments, a thought experiment and an actual experiment, by Galileo Galilei, the 16th- and 17th-century physicist and astronomer.The experiments were created to argue the idea of a rotating Earth as opposed to a stationary Earth around which rotated the Sun, planets, and stars.
Galileo's thought experiment concerned the outcome (c) of attaching a small stone (a) to a larger one (b) Galileo set out his ideas about falling people, and about projectiles in general, in his book Two New Sciences (1638). The two sciences were the science of motion, which became the foundation-stone of physics, and the science of materials ...
Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source connected to a Geiger counter are placed in a sealed box. As illustrated, the quantum description uses a superposition of an alive cat and one that has died. In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment concerning quantum superposition.
Knowledge argument. The knowledge argument (also known as Mary's Room or Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia " (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986). The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black-and-white world where ...